FUSION

ISSUE 16 / 2020

THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN

THE MOMENTARY MONUMENT PORTRAYS TWO FIGURES STANDING BACK TO BACK, ONE LOOKING BACK AT THE PAST, AND THE OTHER FORWARD TO THE FUTURE. THE WORDS “NEVER FEAR” ARE EMBEDDED IN THE SCULPTURE

02 | SUTD CHANGES START OF ACADEMIC YEAR | SUTD COMMUNITY GRANT & OTHER FINANCIAL SCHEMES FOR STUDENTS

SUTD COMMUNITY GRANT & OTHER FINANCIAL SCHEMES FOR STUDENTS

SUTD CHANGES START OF ACADEMIC YEAR TO SEPTEMBER 2020

Given the uncertainty of the restrictions to on-campus activities

and lessons in light of the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, SUTD

decided to push back the start of its academic year (AY) for

the incoming AY2020 cohort from May to September this year.

This change in the term start will be a permanent one and will

extend to subsequent intakes of students. For students joining

SUTD this year, the AY will start on 14 September instead of 18

May.

The plan to change the start of academic year has been in

the works over the past year and was meant to take effect in

2022. However, it was brought forward to this year to ensure

a higher possibility of students experiencing SUTD’s signature

hands-on design-centric curriculum, and to preserve its unique

cohort-based first-year educational experience. Students will

still take the required eight terms of undergraduate coursework

and graduate in May 2024 instead of September 2023. SUTD

also extended its admissions exercise this year and reopened

its applications portal from 4 to 17 May 2020. So, students

Starting in academic year 2020, SUTD students who are not on

scholarship or financial aid will receive the SUTD Community

Grant to help defray the cost of education. This is part of SUTD’s

efforts to ensure that no deserving Singaporean student will be

denied access to our programmes due to financial reasons.

The Community Grant, a fixed amount of $1,500 per term or

$3,000 per year, will be given to all existing and incoming

Singaporean undergraduates who are not already receiving

some form of financial aid or scholarship. The grant is tenable

for up to eight academic terms, provided the student continues

to meet the eligibility criteria. It is estimated that more than

800 students will benefit from this grant each year.

Other financial schemes SUTD has, include the SUTD Education

Opportunity Grant (SEOG), which provides financial support

to students from lower and middle income families. Taken

together with the enhanced Higher Education Community

Bursary from the Government, these students can receive

a financial package that will cover 100% of their tuition fees,

including their hostel fees during the Freshmore (first-year)

terms.

SUTD President, Professor Chong Tow Chong said: “SUTD has

introduced various financial schemes that are in line with the

Government’s efforts to enable every Singaporean student to

have the opportunity to receive a good education regardless

of family circumstances. The SUTD Community Grant and

SEOG help ensure all eligible students who want to pursue an

education in technology and design will not miss out on an

SUTD education because of financial difficulties.”

who previously considered applying to SUTD but missed

the earlier application window or prospective Singaporean

undergraduates who were planning to study overseas, but now

prefer to study locally, would have had another opportunity to

apply. This academic calendar change, which will align with the

other Autonomous Universities’ academic calendars, will also

enable SUTD to better cater to the Operationally Ready Date

(ORD) schedules of polytechnic graduates.

Existing students from the AY2019 intake and earlier will

continue with their original academic calendar to minimise

disruption to their studies.

With the later start of term for the AY2020 cohort, SUTD

has offered students who matriculate before September the

opportunity to take up the Special Summer Programme (SSP)

before they start school. The SSP, which comprises e-learning

classes, bridging programmes and research activities, comes

at no additional cost.

WHAT ARE SOME OF CLASS 2019 STUDENTS DOING? | 03

WHAT ARE SOME OF OUR CLASS OF 2019 STUDENTS DOING AFTER GRADUATING?

Cindy Ong

Bachelor of Engineering in Information Systems Technology

and Design

Cindy joined Mastercard after graduating from SUTD. She is

currently in the company’s graduate programme and is working

as a Programme Manager as part of her current rotation.

Cindy has always been interested in using technology to

improve quality of life. She also felt that since the payment

sector was something that is present in people’s everyday

lives, it would be beneficial to understand how technology

and design thinking can be used to improve the experience of

consumers.

Her job requires technical knowledge in order to understand

the payment ecosystem, such as how a payment operates in

the back end for a consumer. At SUTD, Cindy learnt the basics

of cryptography, which was key in helping her understand

how payment technology companies like Mastercard ensures

security for its customers. With this background knowledge,

she is able to quickly learn on the job and relate to different

stakeholders.

The Fifth Row activities Cindy participated in, specifically the

SUTD Welfare Club: Minions, also taught her valuable skills and

insights into stakeholder engagement and management. These

skills are highly essential in her current role. She feels that it is

not easy to engage with stakeholders and is glad to have had

multiple opportunities to do so during her time in SUTD.

SUTD graduates have always been an eclectic bunch, with

many going on various paths after graduating. We asked a few

alumni from the Class of 2019 to share what they took away

from the SUTD education experience and how it has given

them an extra edge in the marketplace.

Dion Tan

Bachelor of Engineering in Engineering Product Development

Dion joined the Changi Airport Group (CAG) upon graduation

and is working on projects related to robotics and automation

in the airside for the upcoming Changi Airport Terminal 5 (T5).

As T5 will be comparatively as big as the size of today’s airport,

it will require extensive manpower to run its operations. Due to

limited manpower, Dion’s role is to look at utilising automation

to ease or make certain processes less labour intensive and

more operationally efficient. This would not only potentially

ease thousands of workers’ work processes but could also

improve millions of passengers’ travel experience. His position

also gives him the opportunity to be creative and innovative

since the entire terminal will be built from a blank slate.

As Dion graduated from the Engineering Product Development

(EPD) robotics track, the broad knowledge in robotics, machine

learning and artificial intelligence helped him understand the

projects he is managing. Furthermore, SUTD’s strong design

culture and curriculum benefited him greatly in his job as the

design phases and methodologies are very similar and relevant

to his field of work and he has been applying it regularly to

understand the constraints of today’s operations.

Nur Farizah Binte Muhammad Segar

Bachelor of Engineering in Engineering Product Development

Farizah joined ST Engineering as an engineer after she

graduated. She had previously interned at ST Engineering

during her second year at SUTD and even initiated her Capstone

(final year) project with them.

At ST Engineering, Farizah designs new products for the marine

sector and fabricates several mechanical components. Farizah

will usually go through the ideation process, reviews and

analysis before fabrication, which mirrors the same approach

when undertaking projects in SUTD. The main difference is the

scale of these projects, where more factors must be considered

before producing an ideal solution.

Like her Capstone group which comprised classmates with

different expertise, Farizah’s job also involves working with

electrical and software engineers. Overall, she feels the

SUTD curriculum had been beneficial in helping her ease

into the transition from school to the industry as she had the

opportunity to engage with people from various backgrounds

while working on multiple design projects.

During her time in SUTD, Farizah was active in the Volleyball and

Rotaract clubs. She was the Team Leader for Project Radiate

360 2019 Overseas Community Involvement Programme

(OCIP) where she and her team went on a two-week project at

the Tra-Vinch province of South Vietnam. For Farizah, leading a

team of 24 members on the OCIP trip was indeed a challenge.

As the leader, her communication skills strengthened as she

had to liaise with the partnering organisation overseas to

understand their needs. Interacting with members from various

backgrounds and personalities during the trip also developed

her people skills and she felt that it contributed to her feeling

more comfortable with conversing and working with her

colleagues at the workplace now. Farizah’s key takeaway from

the OCIP project was not to be afraid to take risks, because

mistakes are valuable learning opportunities that help one

grow as individuals.

While in ST Engineering, Farizah continues to expand her

sphere of knowledge even as she undertakes more projects,

and she hopes to be able to create more products for the

advancement of the world.

Vivian Lai

Bachelor of Engineering in Engineering Systems and Design

Vivian is currently working as a product planner in Motorola

Solutions Pte Ltd. She was attracted to joining this company

due to its mission statement, “Helping People Be Their Best In

The Moments That Matter”, making her feel that she is a part of

an organisation that creates products to impact lives.

Vivian’s daily work involves liaising with various stakeholders,

overseeing and strategising on a macro level, and making

decisions to enable successful launches of products into the

Asia-Pacific market. SUTD had equipped Vivian with both hard

(data analytics) and soft (communication and leadership) skills

which enable her to analyse and make informed decisions as

well as build good relationships with her colleagues. The ample

project management opportunities in SUTD also served as

good educational experiences for her as she learnt to work with

many different types of people, a useful skill for her current

role. Furthermore, SUTD also taught her to be resourceful in

searching for her own answers, especially during the circuit

breaker period, when she had to work from home.

Going forward, Vivian hopes to have the opportunity to work

overseas and she feels that working in a multi-national company

like Motorola could possibly make this wish come true.

04 | WHAT ARE SOME OF CLASS 2019 STUDENTS DOING?

Christopher Michael Wicks

Master of Architecture

Christopher currently works as an Architectural Associate in

the Aviation department at Surbana Jurong. His main projects

are designing buildings related to Changi Airport Terminal 5.

Graduating from the Architecture and Sustainable Design pillar

has equipped Christopher with the know-how to use design

software that help him with his architecture-related work. He

also picked up PhotoShop as an undergraduate, and apart from

using it for diagrams and renders required for his school work,

he felt it has been a crucial skill in enabling his side hobby,

meme making, too. SUTD’s strong emphasis on “maker culture”

also left a deep impact on him as he felt he could produce any

prototype he could think of in the Fabrication Lab while on

campus. Hence, he decided to purchase his own 3D printer and

laser engraving machine after he started work.

This “maker culture” and design skills would prove useful, along

with his 3D printer during the COVID-19 period. His parents and

friends had sent him a web link of someone 3D printing ear

guards for healthcare workers overseas. Since he had the right

tools, Christopher decided to volunteer to 3D print a few ear

guards as well. He tested and adjusted the ear guard design for

a better fit and started giving out these ear guards.

Working with his fellow batch-mate, SUTD alumnus Kendrick

Tay, the two set up a Facebook group “SG Makers Against

COVID-19” to gather people who were keen to help healthcare

workers during the pandemic. The group is currently helping to

print these ear guards for several local hospitals and healthcare

organisations.

Going forward, Christopher aspires to improve the architecture

industry as a whole. He wants to be part of the incoming wave

of new young leaders who strive to improve the industry. He

feels that technology can benefit the industry and hopes to

instil more of it in the architecture community. Christopher also

believes that if everyone is able to learn a new skill and embrace

change for the better, people will benefit from the ground up.

“Everyone works more efficiently, everyone is happier, and

ultimately able to have more time for themselves, which I find is

a very underrated aspect in today’s modern life. At the end of

the day, we all want a good night’s sleep”.

Three alumni from SUTD’s Class of 2017, Huang Jing Jie,

Jionghan Ng and Amos Choo, came together to found the

start-up Novocall in January 2018 a few months after they

graduated. Their product is a conversational sales automation

software that helps companies improve lead response time,

increase website conversions, and provide actionable analytics

for marketing teams.

The idea came from Amos when he was interning at one of

the telecom companies in Singapore. He realised that the

experience most customers faced was one that would frustrate

even the most patient caller – long wait times and technology

that was dated, impersonal and inefficient. Amos reached out

to his schoolmates and together they built a sales automation

software in four months.

“With the digital transformation of work and communications

well underway, Novocall presents the vision of reinvented call

solutions of tomorrow, today,” Huang Jing Jie, co-founder and

CEO said. Today, Novocall is used across 42 countries globally,

by over 2,000 businesses (including 50 in Singapore and

Malaysia) in high-touch industries such as financial services,

travel, real estate, and insurance.

Novocall is supported by SMU BIG and the SUTD’s

Entrepreneurship Centre. They have also gone through an

acceleration programme with UOB-Finlab. In March this

year, Novocall also announced it raised a seed investment

round totalling S$700,000. The investment will go towards

the company’s expansion plans to accelerate its product and

customer development. While the company currently has

clients in Singapore and Malaysia, there are plans to expand in

the region, particularly in Indonesia and Thailand.

WHAT ARE SOME OF CLASS 2019 STUDENTS DOING? | SUTD START-UP NOVOCALL | 05

SUTD START-UP FEATURE: NOVOCALL

Novocall’s co-founders, front row from left, Jionghan Ng, Amos Choo and Huang Jing Jie

06 | THE MOMENTARY MONUMENT

THE MOMENTARY MONUMENT BY GOH EE YAN EION AND SIM I-EN GRACE

The Momentary Monument was unveiled on 16 February this

year. Its design was led by both of us from SUTD and we spent

more than half a year working on it.

Located at the foot of Blk 313 Sembawang Drive, The

Momentary Monument serves as a marker to commemorate Mr

Lee Kuan Yew’s historic “From Mudflats to Metropolis” speech

at the original site of Sree Narayana Mission on 12 September

1965. This project was awarded to our team as part of a design

competition held during Singapore’s Bicentennial Year 2019.

Mr Lee’s speech spoke about the hard work and efforts of

our forefathers who came before us and their contributions in

shaping the success of Singapore today. This quote from the

speech stood out to us and inspired us to translate the essence

of this message into our design. The theme that most resonated

with us was how each generation has a pivotal role to play in

inspiring the generations that come after.

Our marker depicts two back-to-back figures. One signifies

looking to the past, and the other, to the future. The human

figures, vertically dissected into parallel stainless-steel metal

plates, were designed to be visually interactive, offering a

‘disappearing’ visual tease, depending on the observer’s

viewpoint. Our design scope extended to the landscape, lights,

benches and walking paths around the marker. Our team has

embedded the message “Never Fear” that is to be discovered

only when one sits on the bench and completes the quote

Besides SUTD, the team consisted of friends from National

University of Singapore and the Singapore Polytechnic. We

came together to participate in the competition because of our

mutual appreciation for the meaning behind this project and

shared interest in exploring sculpture art. Through this project,

we forged stronger friendships and bonds with people from

different schools possessing different skill sets and learning

from one another. The most memorable part of this project was

in overcoming the challenges we faced while communicating

with different stakeholders on our design intent and seeing the

marker evolve from a concept to reality.

Images courtesy of Sembawang Town Council.

The marker portrays two figures standing back to back, one looking back at the past, and the other forward to the future.

The marker was officially unveiled by Sembawang GRC MPs Khaw Boon Wan, Ong Ye Kung, Amrin Amin, Vikram Nair and Lim Wee Kiak.

Our team members are Eion Goh and Grace Sim from SUTD, Gabrielle Wong and Ahmad Nazaruddin from NUS and Matz Goh from SP.

“Over 100 years ago, this was a mud-flat, swamp.

Today, this is a modern city. 10 years from now,

this will be a metropolis! Never fear.”

- Lee Kuan Yew

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

SUTD RESEARCH SHOWS EVIDENCE THAT BILINGUALISM DELAYS THE BRAIN’S AGING PROCESSIt is clear that we must prioritise identifying and alleviating the

conditions that made the COVID-19 pandemic possible. Even

as it rages, scientists are already asking if it is more than just

a virus, but rather a symptom emerging from something much

deeper, a nonlinear dynamical system of coupled pathologies

underlying a veneer of “progress” in an increasingly fragile,

volatile, hyperconnected world.

A new article ‘Introducing the 21st Century’s New Four

Horsemen of the Coronapocalypse’ by Kang Hao Cheong

and Michael C. Jones published in BioEssays describes the

convergence of four broad, but easily identifiable systemic,

pathologically networked conditions, or “Four Horsemen”,

that are hurtling civilisation towards potential self-destruction

in which a pandemic is only one of many possible triggers.

The “Four Horsemen” of overpopulation, globalisation,

hyperconnectivity and increasingly limited and centralised

supply chains are the broad parameters underlying the

probability space of catastrophe.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed critical pathologies

lurking within the dynamical global system of commerce,

governance, and public health,” said Assistant Professor

Cheong from SUTD.

From this heuristic framework, a pandemic can metastasise

into other vital domains, such as economic and geopolitical

stability and other 2nd and 3rd order, multiplicative effects that

could snowball into unprecedented catastrophe.

“Even if COVID-19 is not the proximal cause of global

catastrophe this time, like the rogue iceberg that slashed the

Titanic, it is a blow sufficiently unsettling to awaken us to the

fact that we are sailing into a dangerous sea that is increasingly

crowded with icebergs,” said Jones, a co-author of the article.

The next time you have the urge to lapse into English while

conversing in your other language, try not to and your brain

will thank you for it.

SUTD researchers examined and found that active

bilingualism – the regular balanced use of two languages and

language switching – will offer protection against the brain’s

ageing process. The paper was published in the Journals of

Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

Existing literature on the effects of bilingualism on the adult

brain were inconsistent and lacking in clear trends. So, the

researchers from SUTD set out to explore the executive

control mechanisms and context under which bilingualism can

be a protective source against cognitive decline in the normal

ageing process.

Executive functions are complex, higher order processes that

the brain performs. These functions mainly allow people to

maintain their attention by focusing on relevant information

and ignoring distractors, maintain information until execution

as well as motor planning.

In the study conducted in Singapore, cognitively healthy

seniors aged between 60 and 84 years old who were bilingual

in Chinese and English, were tasked to complete an array of

computerised executive control tasks.

It was found that active usage of two languages with less

frequent language switching predicted better performance

in the goal maintenance and conflict monitoring aspects of

executive control. This suggests that bilingualism can be a

protective source against cognitive decline. More importantly,

active bilingualism can be seen as a lifestyle factor that could

buffer against cognitive declines associated with normal

ageing.

“The effort involved in not switching between languages and

‘staying’ in the target language is more cognitively demanding

than switching between languages while actively using both

languages. Our study shows that the seniors developed

more efficient neural organisation at brain regions related to

language control, which also overlap with areas involved in

executive control,” explained principal investigator Associate

Professor Yow Wei Quin from SUTD.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC | BILINGUALISM DELAYS BRAIN’S AGEING PROCESS | 07

FUSION - THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN

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